shippiness

[kindkit]

snickfic posed the question "What's one of your favorite shippy moments for your ship? Why do you love it??

My answer is under the spoiler cut

for the sake of anyone who's somehow unspoiled for Our Flag Means Death

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I'm somewhat embarrassed that Ed/Stede is "my ship," because it's the big canon ship and everyone loves it. (And then I think about how lucky I would have considered myself, ten or even five years ago, to have a canonical romance between the male main characters of a genre show.) Anyway, it's a great ship, emotionally rich, well-written and well-performed.

Because the show establishes Ed/Stede so well, there are a lot of excellent shippy moments to choose from. I'm going to go with the "Blackbeard's Bar & Grill" conversation, because I think it gets at something really essential between them: they play together. Ed and Stede are both highly creative men who've had that creativity suppressed since childhood, occasionally for good reasons (Mary's not wrong about the ridiculousness of running away to sea, and Izzy's not wrong that Ed needs to pay attention to survival) but mostly because of toxic masculinity. Be a man, not a girly boy who picks flowers and tells stories. Be a man, not a girly boy who dreams of wearing silk. Don't be silly. And then they meet, and almost immediately start being silly together. They start to play, dress-up and pretend and play-fighting with real swords.

But the Bar & Grill conversation happens on a day when the game hasn't gone well. Ed's in a bad mood and doesn't really want to play, and Stede is fretting himself sick because his plan is all going wrong. And then, somehow, together they make a luminous moment of absurd joy out of this emotional mess, just like they make a meal out of barbecued snake. It's not quite enough to save the day--that takes Lucius's intervention--but it's a moment where we the audience, and Lucius as the in-universe audience, see how much they love each other, and why. Even if they don't see it yet themselves.